Customer & Influencer Research in Social Media

“If you don’t eat your meat you can’t have any pudding. How can you have any pudding if you don’t eat your meat!” Pink Floyd, The Wall.

That quote from Another Brick in the Wall reminds me of the cart horse situation with social media marketing: If you don’t know your customers you can’t engage them. How can you ever hope to engage your customers if you don’t understand who they are?

There are so many questions from marketers and agencies alike about how best to grow businesses through online channels. Questions are particularly popular when it comes to best practices for social tools. “Always do this” and “always do that” is what most marketers have been bombarded with for as long as there have been conferences to attend and email newsletters to subscribe to.

Inevitably, many of the most pressing questions about social media come down to understanding who you’re trying to reach. For example, some common questions I hear a lot at conferences:

Q: Should we blog or focus on Twitter? Is Facebook or LinkedIn a better fit? Foursquare or Gowalla? (Or other shiny object)

A: Find where your customers spend their time and spend your time there too.

Q: What type of social content should we create? How often? Where?

A: Study your customers as they create, consume and share content. Then you’ll know the what, how, when and where. They why has to come from your organization.

Q: What is the most overrated social media site?

A: The one your customers aren’t using.

So much time is spent on tactics without a good understanding of goals, audience and how to measure success with social media programs. As we discuss Roadmapping social participation with companies, audience research is one of the key areas of importance. As I mention above, how can you reach and engage customers if you don’t understand them?

Let’s say you’ve used a social media monitoring tool like SM2 to identify who is talking about your brand and topics of importance to your prospects and customers. Within this analysis, you’ve noticed that there’s alot of activity on Twitter.

A logical next step might be to further investigate influential Twitter users. If a paid tool like Radian6 or SM2 don’t fit your budget you can try free tools Trackur or Social Mention to gain some insight into content types, commentary and sharing/publishing platforms.

Other tools you might use to identify influentials on Twitter include directories like wefollow.

Under the tag, “SEO” you can see that Matt Cutts is the most influential. Since reaching out directly to a popular person on Twitter, especially a Google employee, might not be prudent, it can be helpful to learn more about that individual and who they are influenced by as well as who they influence.

Using the site Klout, you can see a Twitter influence score (78 is pretty high) and other information including predictions on who is most influenced by Matt and more interestingly, who may be an influencer of Matt Cutts.

As for understanding what kind of content someone likes on Twitter, you can look at retweets and @ responses. You can also look at what kind of content and what user tweets get favorited most,. Favstar is a tool that does just that.

In this example, Favstar shows which Tweets Matt Cutts has favorited. The types of content and users can be noted for guidance with future outreach.

I mentioned free social media monitoring tools above including Social Mention. Below is a screengrab that shows how much information you can get from Social Mention with options to download into Excel friendly formats.

The basic tools I’ve shared here are just that, basic. They’re good for poking around and getting familiar with discovery of social content and influencers. However, it would take a more robust tool set (which is what Agencies and larger companies do) to scale monitoring over many topics, influencers and conversations.

Other customer social media research tactics include:

Survey your existing customers for social preferences and behaviors

Review web analytics for social media sources and behaviors

Tap into Compete, Quantcast, Alexa information on specific social sites

In combination with directly observed and experienced customer behaviors and preferences, general site data can compliment understanding of customer social content needs. What are some tactics and tools you’ve found useful for researching customers on the social web?

(4 votes, average: 4.75 out of 5)

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@LeeOdden is the CEO of TopRank Marketing and editor of Online Marketing Blog. Cited for his expertise by The Economist, Forbes and the Wall Street Journal, he's the author of the book Optimize and presents internationally on integrated content, search, social media and influencer marketing. When not at conferences, consulting, or working with his talented team, he's likely on a beach somewhere doing absolutely nothing.

Awesome is the word for the post Lee,We are heading towards social business and we have almost everything we want to excel in it, from How-To tools to managing tools to measurement tools.What we do need is something which is very common-sensical that is an understanding of our customers as you have portrayed above.Thanks for sharing this post, goes down as one of my Top-Rank favorites…

Great post, Lee. We're getting ready to launch a social media survey to our customers today!

Along the same lines, I recently heard a killer Twitter research tactic from @cspenn. He suggests spending the extra few minutes on your Twitter searches by using the advanced search to include potential signals of intent as well as a subject. For example, don't just look for the term “social media.” Find “social media” when accompanied by terms like “suggest,” “recommend,” “anyone,” and “help” to find not just conversations about social media, but conversations where someone is looking for the info you provide as well.

Are there any tools out there that allow you to run your customer email file through to know how many of them have accounts on social media sites like Facebook or Twitter? When setting up personal accounts on Facebook and Twitter they both will link to your email address book to find people you know that are already on the site. That would make a great tool for businesses to know where customers are already at, whether they are talking about them or not. You could also then target emails to those specific customers to let them know your business has a Twitter/Facebook account instead of emailing your entire file. This tool would be great for smaller businesses that don't have enough social media chatter/buzz to be measurable.

Great approach! So many times you see agencies building “packaged programs” for their clients. These programs may be a good “first step” but completely dismiss the point of social media…..reaching your target. Anyone who gets involved needs to understand there are different tools for different clients…everyone doesn't fit into the same box.

Q: What is the most overrated social media site? A: The one your customers aren’t using.

Too right! People really need to stop fixating on sites, platforms, et al and look at what their end objectives are. Along the lines of my (too-oft-repeated) measurement warble, it's about measurable objectives that support the bottom line of the business… right?

“Think of social media as a cocktail party about how to create buzz online. “You don’t go to a cocktail party and scream at the top of your lungs, ‘Buy my product.’ What works is you have some meaningful conversation first. And that’s just how social media works.”

One tool I didn’t notice in the blog, is Visible Technologies tool TruVoice. It is one that we, as an agency, use a lot for our clients, along with R6, and it is one of the best tools for tracking customer sentiment. It is very accurate as every post is scored by a person rather than the automated scoring the other tools available use.

“Find where your customers spend their time and spend your time there too.”This will make it on my top internet marketing quotes. I am currently building a tool to help users identify these opportunities, if you have time please check it out and give feedback: http://www.cluepad.com

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